September 9, 2021 • 47 mins
What are tears? Are humans indeed the only animal that wraps and what purpose do they serve? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the topic of tears from a scientific and even religious standpoint.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
My Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of
My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. This is Robert Lamp and this is Joe McCormick,
and we're back with part two of our series on tears.
We figured out by today this is definitely going to
(00:22):
be at least three parts because there's just so much
that you know that the tears make an ocean and
and uh, and they don't stop coming, so so there
will be at least one more. Yeah, there's really there's
almost too much. Because sometimes we look into things and
we're like, okay, what is the what's the mythological ramifications
of this? Are there any treatments of this and mythology
(00:42):
or religion? And with something like tears, the answer is
is yes, every religion, every mythology pretty much, you know. Um,
so it's easy to get lost sort of just trade,
you know, chasing some of these ideas down and then
trying to figure out what which ones are worth talking
about which ones are not. And then of course from
the scientific point of view there uh, we've already rolled
(01:03):
through I think some of the science of tears, and
we have a bit more to cover today. Well, We've
got a lot more to cover on the science of tears.
In the last episode, we talked some about some of
the basic, uncontroversial biological facts about tears, you know, like
basal tears and reflex tears, what they're made of and
and how how they're secreted from the lacrimal glands, and
(01:24):
what they normally do. But the big question, the big
sort of mystery about tears, is this question of human
emotional tears. Humans appear to be the only animal that
sheds tears as a response to emotional states, and so
one of the huge questions is why, what is the
biological purpose and thus what is the evolutionary justification unique
(01:49):
to our species of liquid coming out of your eyes
in response to feeling emotions. As we talked about in
the last episode. You know, because this is not a
settled question, there are just there tons of hypotheses that
have been put forward over the years. We talked in
the last episode about several very unlikely ones, for example,
(02:10):
tears being a byproduct of an alleged aquatic ape past
for human beings. This is almost certainly not correct because
we don't put much stock in the aquatic ap hypothesis
Another one is this idea that maybe tears are somehow
derived from a conditioned response of our ancient ancestors to
getting smoke in their eyes at funeral pyres after they
(02:30):
started controlling fire. There are several reasons we talked about
in the last episode by that that's probably not correct either.
So over the next couple of episodes, we're going to
be exploring a bunch more of the existing hypotheses about
the evolutionary purpose of emotional tears. And I think you
can sort these into three broad categories. The first being
there there is no purpose, maybe they're just some kind
(02:52):
of byproduct, the second being the purpose is intra personal,
meaning internal to the body of the person who's crying.
And then the third would be that the purpose is interpersonal,
meaning that tears serve some kind of external or relational function. Now,
on the score of no purpose explanations, here's the kind
(03:14):
of surprising fact. Apparently, Charles Darwin actually believed that emotional
tears served no purpose of their own, but rather were
a byproduct of other purposeful adaptations, notably facial expressions and
vocal expressions. In his eighteen seventy two book The Expression
of Emotions, in Man and Animals, uh Darwin wrote, quote,
(03:36):
the shedding of tears appears to have originated through reflex
action from the spasmodic contraction of the eyelids, together perhaps
with the eyeballs becoming gorged with blood during the act
of screaming. Therefore, weeping probably came on rather late in
the line of our descent. And this conclusion agrees with
the fact that our nearest allies, the nthropomorphous apes, do
(03:58):
not weep. So the second observation there being that that
the other apes that were most closely related to they
do produce tears, of course basal tears in their eyes
and irritant tears, but they don't produce emotional tears. So
that observation is correct. But I think Darwin's influenced in
the in the first half of that paragraph there is
almost definitely wrong. His idea is that, well, when we
(04:20):
get upset, we cry out with our voices, and this
makes like blood rushed to the face because you're screaming,
and maybe all the blood sort of makes your eyes swell,
and then they're Also when you're upset, there are facial
muscle contractions like involuntary reflexive contractions of things like the eyelids,
and this just sort of squeezes tears out as an
(04:41):
accidental byproduct. I don't think I can go with Darwin
on this one. This sounds really wrong. Yeah, I mean,
I mean, on one hand, we've already talked about the
various sounds and screaming type uh effects that you see
with with other primates. I mean, if you've been to
a zoo or you've been to a natural environment where
(05:03):
primates make their home, you may have heard this. So
that they are there, they can create the kind of
screaming that I guess could theoretically cause the eyeballs to
become gorged with blood. So that doesn't seem to have
much weight to it. Yeah, it's not that it would
be impossible for contractions of the facial muscles to cause tears.
I do think this may even be an explanation. I've
(05:24):
seen this invoked as an explanation for why sometimes your
eyes get teary when you yawn. Like when you yawn,
that may put some kind of pressure on the lachrymal
glands that causes some excessive tearing, which you know it
leads to blurring of the vision. After you're done yawning,
and then you might need to wipe your eyes, maybe
a similar thing with coughing. So it's it's not impossible
that contractions of the facial muscles could cause some tearing.
(05:47):
It just seems like the tears being produced by the
lachrymal glands during an emotional episode or something that exceeds this,
this kind of tearing. Um and uh And I don't know,
most researchers who focus on this area really do think
that this is not a plausible explanation. It seems pretty
clear that tears are a true adaptive trait that serve
(06:07):
their own functions and function independently from just the contractions
of the facial muscles. Because another question would be like, well, okay,
if this is true for humans, how come other like
apes that were closely related to don't also cry when
they contract their facial muscles in in emotional episodes. Yeah.
Like I said, it seems like we just have we
have more evidence to the contrary at this point. Yeah,
(06:29):
so it seems like tears are probably purposeful, a true
adaptive trait of some kind. So the next category would be, well,
maybe tears have some kind of intra personal purpose. They
do something within the body, within the self, uh. And
there are many ways of approaching this, but to cite
a characteristic example of this type of explanation, I wanted
(06:51):
to look at the detoxification hypothesis. This is one that
used to be pretty popular but has really fallen out
of favor historically. I think this is one of the
most popular hypotheses for for explaining the function of tears.
It was advanced by the American biochemist William Fry in
the nineteen eighties, I think first published in nineteen eighty five,
(07:12):
I believe and Fry's reasoning went like this, Okay, when
humans are under stress, you're having some intense emotional you
know about of emotion, there is a build up of
potentially toxic substances in the blood. So you know, think
about all the different uh stress effects of stress you
learned about. You know, when when you're really distressed, your
(07:33):
your bloodstream floods with cortisol. You're you're freaked out. You
can almost kind of like feel it moving through your body,
or at least maybe it's an illusion, but I feel
like I can, like when I'm having a stressful experience,
there's almost a sematic sensation of the spreading of this
kind of like uh, aggravating numbness and fry positive that
(07:53):
when this happens, when your body fills up with all
these potentially toxic contaminants or horn stress hormones, things like that,
the body cleanses these excess contaminants by purging them through
the tear response, with the lachrymal glands acting like kidneys
do for the urinary system. So under this hypothesis, you
(08:14):
are you are peeing out your eyes when you are
really stressed. Yeah, and I can I can understand why
this idea, you know, had had some support behind it
because I mean, on one level, yes, we can look
to the kidneys in the urinary system and we can see, uh,
we can see something like this. But to your point,
(08:35):
the feeling of all this welling up inside of us
and then the what often feels like a release. And
I have to stress though that when when you get it,
look at different accounts of weeping, and depending on the
circumstances of the weeping, such as like solitary weeping versus
public weeping, and then that's going to depend on the
culture in the scenario in which is taking place. Um,
(08:56):
you do see a lot of accounts where people say, Okay,
I felt better after or I wept after. You know,
all this built up and then was released. Uh, so
we can under we could we can imagine where like
looking at this idea of what the urinary system is doing,
thinking about how we feel before and after an emotional outburst,
we could easily fall in line with thinking like, yeah, yeah,
(09:18):
those that that was the top the toxins building up
in my body, and I am letting the toxins out.
Weeping is just the body releasing the poison. Yeah. Yeah,
this is having a sort of like chemical read on
the feeling of catharsis people uh sometimes experience from weeping. Uh. Now,
of course I should say before I move on that
this hypothesis does not have much support among any modern
(09:41):
tear response researchers. I was reading it seems like the
evidence for it is not good. It has been strongly
pushed back against. But like you're saying, it does have
this intuitive appeal because there is a widespread belief in
the healing power of tears. I actually I came across
the stat that I found astounding. So I was reading
an article in Time magazine by Mandy Oaklander from sixteen
(10:03):
that was about interviewed several different researchers who work on
the subject of tears, and it's cited one analysis that
looked at a bunch of articles about crying in the
media over a period of more than a hundred years,
so going way back, and it found that nine four
percent of them described crying as in some way good
(10:24):
for the mind and body, and or described holding back
tears as bad for the mind and body. And yet
despite this gut feeling that people seem to have, I mean,
I feel this way too. It's it's a common belief.
This this this gut feeling that tears bring catharsis and
relief and they heal you. They're good for you, they
heal the mind and body. Evidence for this is apparently
(10:47):
pretty scarce on the ground. The same article by Oaklander
in Times cites a researcher named Jonathan Rottenberg, who is
a professor of psychology at the University of South Florida
who studies emotion and is on work with tears, and
Rodenberg says that these claims about the healing power of
tears are basically a fable there's just not much evidence
(11:08):
that crying has strong measurable benefits to health, mental or physical,
or that it predictably brings relief or catharsis. I mean,
obviously it does bring a feeling of relief sometimes. I
think we all know that from experience, but maybe not
as consistently as we tend to infer. Yeah, one example,
because some some of us might be you know, you
might wonder, well, okay, what's an example of tears not
(11:30):
having a beneficial effect. One example was brought up, I
think this was in Holy Tears, was that some people,
when queried on this, they mentioned that if they are
weeping out of a feeling of loneliness and they are
doing so in a solitary setting, that they may feel
worse afterwards, which which I think is interesting and I
think that can potentially shed light on some other theories
(11:54):
or potentially provide um some possible evidence for supporting other
hypotheses concerning the reason that we have tears, the function
of tears and human in the human condition. Right, Well,
I'm going to get to this in a minute, but
I think this would be one of the many things
that I would interpret as as possibly pointing to tears
(12:15):
serving a primarily interpersonal function in communication and signaling between
people exactly. Yeah, yeah, you can interpret it as meaning, well,
you know that you did not feel better, because the
the act of weeping is supposed to be communicating something
to another human being. Yeah, and it is supposed to
(12:35):
elicit a response from some But okay, so, so that
addresses the question of like subjective feelings of relief. You know,
sometimes people feel feelings of relief after crying, sometimes people don't.
But the other half of this, this intra personal interpretation,
you know it does does crying do something for you,
make to make your body better in some way, to
(12:56):
give you some kind of internal benefit. The other question
would be like, are there measurable ways that crying can
be found to improve well being apart from just the
the sort of immediate aftermath where you might feel a
feeling of relief or not. What about other types of
measures of physical and mental well being? Well, there was
one study I came across that looked into this question,
(13:18):
and it was by Hez Door for Vinger Hoots. That's
that's add Vingerhoots, So I mentioned in the previous episode,
and who will come up several more times in this
and Michael R. Tremble in eighteen called social and psychological
consequences of not crying possible associations with psychopathology and therapeutic relevance,
And basically, the authors were trying to look into the
(13:41):
question of okay, so that, um, what if you find
people who report that they essentially never cried after a
certain period in their life, they feel like they either
lost the ability to cry or just at some point
in their life they just stopped crying and just don't
cry anymore. Um, can we compare their out comes in
terms of standard measures of well being and social functioning
(14:04):
compared to people who do cry on a regular basis.
So they interviewed Auzy Hausborne because no more tears, that
would have been good, But now so they say quote.
Study participants included four hundred and seventy five people who
reportedly lost the capacity to cry and a hundred and
seventy nine normal control criers. Applied measures assessed crying, well being, empathy, attachment,
(14:28):
social support, and connection with others, and the authors had
hypothesized that people who don't cry would have lower well
being and poor social functioning compared to people who do cry. Uh,
and actually that's not exactly what they found. So they
did find some differences. So people who did not cry,
on average had fewer social connections and less social support,
(14:52):
and also had somewhat less empathy, though of course that's
not going to apply to everybody, and it's worth noting
that those things I just mentioned aren't necessarily a result
of not crying, but could maybe be causes of not crying,
or could maybe be correlates with similar underlying causes. Um.
But what they did what they did not find was
(15:13):
indications of lower well being. In turns, it actually found
that people who cry and people who don't cry were
about the same in terms of psychological measures of well being,
so you know, no more measurable depression, anxiety, and so forth.
Thank thank now. Studies like this don't mean that we
(15:35):
can be sure tears serve no intra personal purposes. You
certainly can't rule it out. Tears may well serve some
kind of purpose within the self, within the body, But personally,
I've become pretty well convinced while researching for these episodes
that the primary adaptive purpose of emotional tears is interpersonal,
meaning it's external, it's social, and relational and that tears
(15:59):
are prime merely for communicating something too and affecting the
behavior of other members of our species other people. Yeah,
I I after reading through Holy Tears, I I also
feel like this is a very strong hypothesis, uh, in
how they discuss the role of tears and religious rights
(16:22):
and rituals. But but one area that I do have
questions about would be, uh, the weeping during media um,
like during a film or something. You know. Uh, I
wonder if that is the same like when we weep
during motion pictures. Is that a communal experience or is
that a personal experience? Are we actually trying to communicate
(16:43):
something to other people viewing the film? Oh? Well, I
mean it wouldn't have to be It wouldn't have to
be intentional on your part. I mean, weeping is often involuntary.
It's usually involuntary, So weeping at a movie I think
could very well be not something you're trying to do
because you are in penstionally communicating with say the movie,
or with other people you're watching the movie with. But
instead it's a standard kind of response to um empathetic
(17:08):
connection with drama you are seeing unfold and your brain
can't really tell the difference between drama in media versus
drama that would be going on with people in your life.
So an adaptation that arises because it's useful with some
some kind of social signaling function for other people also
gets hijacked when you're watching a movie about people. That's true.
(17:29):
So basically what we're talking about here would be it's
like the old example of the train coming at the
screen and early movie go where it's like freaking out,
like ah, this the train is approaching. You jump because
it is uh, it is something that it is stimuli
that should cause you to jump and run away. But
the tearful scene, the emotional scene in an emotion picture,
(17:50):
that is something that is uh, that is more subtle,
and we're just going to respond to it as if
it is something that we should perhaps communally be responding to. Yeah.
I think the same way that a scary movie partially
simulates the feeling of real danger, or that a romantic
movie can cause some kind of romantic arousal. I mean,
it's all like, uh, there's a vicarious uh interaction with
(18:12):
what's going on in the media as if it were
taking place in real life. For a moment, I'd like
to come back to something we were talking about earlier,
the uh, the the hypothesis that there is a purging
of toxins going on during weeping, because this reminds me
of another topic we've discussed in the show before sweating. Uh.
You also see some of this, um, some of this
(18:36):
line of thinking being employed with sweating, sometimes with exercise,
but I've seen it particularly with with sauna traditions. Why
do people feel better after a sauna? What is a
sauna doing? And you do see this sometimes there is
this argument, well, when you're sweating, you're in the sauna,
you release toxins. Uh. But I, if memory serves the
(18:58):
situation is though when you look at like how much
is shed via sweating versus how much is truly shed
via urination? Um, there's just a huge gulf between those numbers. Uh.
So it doesn't really match up, but it but it
becomes difficult to untangle uh this not you know, concerning
how much is purge via sweating, how much is how
(19:18):
much would need to be purged to make a meaningful
impact on your physiology, and how much we feel or
believe we have purged having gone through the experience. Yeah,
it's funny. I'm also skeptical of the idea that this
is why people feel a relief and after sweating or
being in the song. I would expect probably it has
more to do with I don't know, the pleasurable hormones
(19:40):
that people get after, you know, exercise or something like that,
maybe endorphins or something of that nature. Um, I don't know.
I'm just spitballing there. But but yeah, I would be
skeptical of that. And it's funny that what you say
is um parallel to some arguments that are made against
the detoxification hypothesis of tears, because um, much like with
(20:00):
your sweating example, there's probably just not enough of the
stuff in the tears to really make a major difference
in the body. But but but in the next episode,
I think we're going to get more into the direct
formulations of some of the main contending hypotheses for for
explaining the biological evolution of tears. That that will be
more in the next episode. But I did want to
talk about some some broad observations in the idea of
(20:23):
tears as an external or interpersonal adaptation, something that is
that serves a relational function and one piece of evidence
that seemed somewhat convincing to me that tears serve an
external and communicative purpose is that people just automatically, when
they observed tears, interpret them as conveying information about the
(20:46):
emotional states of the person who's crying. And it's not
just that you look at a person who's who's crying
and you say that person is sad. The tears themselves
seem to convey very important information. And this was illustrated
in some research I was reading about in a two
thousand ten NPR article by Alison Aubrey called Teary Eyed Evolution,
(21:07):
Crying serves a Purpose, and this featured an interview with
the researcher named Randolph Cornelius, who was a professor of
psychology at Vassar College. Uh. I'm citing this research in
particular because it came with what I thought was a
very useful visual aid. Um so so Cornelius, the psychologist
he he, he is arguing that tears are useful because
(21:27):
they convey information, and his research did something pretty clever.
It took photographs of people who were crying and then
digitally manipulated them to remove the tears. So you'd have
the same face with the same expression when the person
is crying, except without any tears visible in the eyes
or on the cheeks. And what the study found is
(21:49):
that people rated the same faces without tears as much
more ambiguous. People consistently interpret tearful faces as sad, and
they interpret them as having stronger emotional value. But people
have a lot more difficulty inferring the feelings of those
(22:10):
same faces without the tears. And so, to quote from
Cornelius as as cited in this article, he says, quote,
tears also narrow the range of emotions people think the
models are experiencing. Tearful people are mostly seen as experiencing
emotions in the sadness family, sadness, grief, morning, and so forth.
(22:30):
And Robert, I really, once I looked at these images,
it really hit home for me, because, yeah, so it
will have two faces side by side. One is a
crying face and the other is the same exact face,
but photoshop to have the tears removed and the faces
without tears. Whereas there's like one in the middle of
a man crying with tears rolling down his cheeks and
(22:51):
he looks very sad. And in the picture right next
to him, without the tears, the same expression looks possibly
kind of like smug or defiant. Yeah, I thought, kind
of menacing. Like without the tears the tears removed, he
kind of looks like I like he thinking I might
just beat you up. But in the first one, it's
it's clear this man has been watching a sad football
movie and weeping openly. Uh. There's one that you shared
(23:14):
above this of a child or I think it's a
child looking up um, and with the tears are removed,
it seems like they're perhaps just looking at a bird
flying through the air, but with the tears, it's like
they are looking up at a crucifixion. Yeah. Yeah, The
same face without the tears could be interpreted is kind
of like, um, I don't know, maybe concerned, but also
(23:35):
displaying a possibly creepy kind of interest in something. Uh So, yeah,
at least to me, I immediately from these images can
see the informational value of tears. They radically reduce the
ambiguity in interpreting somebody else's facial expression, and and and
suddenly you're not wondering like what is this person thinking?
(23:57):
You immediately read them as like as kind of sad
and vulnerable and helpless and not dangerous, whereas the same
face without the tears is like, I don't know what's
up with this person? Now? Of course this is all this,
this all becomes more complicated when we we we think
about some of the exceptions to this this rule that
(24:18):
pop up, you know, regarding quinted person could be uh,
a teary eyed you know, perhaps they have some sort
of a tear gland situation going on, or perhaps there
is some sort of irritant in the air, um, something
of that nature. Perhaps they're their sinuses are are bothering them,
or they just yawned. But if you're just looking at them,
you're you're going to instantly go to that something something
(24:40):
powerful or bad has happened and this person may need
comfort in you know. This got me thinking about, um,
another way that tears might work. This is not something
that I found advocated in in any research, though somebody
might have put this forward and I haven't read about
it yet. Um, but this would be uh the idea
that what if tears are you useful as an honest
(25:01):
signal of emotions? That could have evolved as a response
to the evolution of deceit so uh so, So what
I'm imagining here is, you know, humans are are complex
social animals managing complex social relationships, and human brains are
complex enough that humans can lie about what they feel,
(25:26):
and they can lie about who and what they care about.
But because tears are difficult to fake, I wonder if
maybe tears evolved as an honest signal of our true,
motivating feelings, who and what we actually care about and
how we feel about things. And thus I wonder if,
possibly in that way, they could be adaptive because they
(25:48):
make us more trustworthy. A person who cries about something
is less likely to be lying about what their feelings
about that thing are. This, of course makes my mind
instantly go to actor. But that I mean, that's kind
of a whole discussion in and of itself, because you
get into how is the actor summoning the tears? Are
they engaging with with actual tearful memories, or you know,
(26:10):
a deep reading of the script and so forth. But
ultimately the result is when you watch a film and
the actor is summoning tears, it it makes anything that's
going on on the screen more believable, no matter how
poor the screenplay, no matter how weird the lighting. If
the actor is is summoning actual tears in their performance
(26:31):
like that, that gives it a leg up. Yeah, and
I think it's worth noting that like most people, like
some people can cry on command, but most people would
have a hard time doing that, Like it's not easy
to do unless you have that that chunk of onion
in your in your handkerchief. Right, Is that the older
actor's trick? Yeah, I guess so. So, yeah, maybe it
has something to do with the evolution of deceit. But anyway,
(26:53):
that's just sort of like a weird thought that popped
into my head. Maybe that'll connect to some of the
hypotheses that we that we discussing more detail in the
next part. But I wanted to talk about another study
that was interesting about ways that tears might be useful
for interpersonal signaling and behavior manipulation. And this would be
something that's not focused on conveying information that's perceived consciously,
(27:16):
like what we were talking about with looking at tears
on people's faces a minute ago. This would be operating
at a subconscious level on the basis of chemical signaling
or chemo signaling. This next example is also good because
from what I can tell, this is a study that
led to some maybe very misleading headlines in popular coverage.
But anyway, so some studies in mice have found that
(27:40):
behaviorally relevant chemo signals in tears. So these would not
be emotional tears because mice don't shed emotional tears. These
would just be regular basil or reflex tears. These chemo
signals in mice include pheromones that uh, for example, can
do things like make male mice more attractive as mates,
(28:02):
or there can be chemo signals in juvenile mice that
prevent adults from attempting unwanted mating behaviors with with those mice,
so that they can have kind of uh, discouraging unwanted
behaviors and other mice. And picking up on that research,
there were some scientists who in your two thousand eleven
looked into whether there could be similar chemo signals in
(28:25):
human tears, and so this led to a study by
Shanny Gelstein at All published in Science called human tears
contain a chemo signal. Now, I want to be clear
that I'm often kind of skeptical about I'm not quite
sure why this is, but I think maybe because Uh.
There have been a few studies along these lines that
have later turned out to be not well founded. But
(28:47):
I'm kind of skeptical about studies finding big macro behavioral
effects of imperceptible smells and stuff in humans, so I
would definitely want this verified by a good bit of
independent replication. But if this the finding of the study
is correct, what it found is that emotional tears in
humans tend to contain chemicals that change the behavior of adults,
(29:13):
especially adult men, possibly making them less aggressive and less
likely to experience sexual arousal, maybe making them more likely to, say,
provide care behaviors. The study measured this by having people
uh smell tears that were from from human donors, and
they found that tears that were produced by women who
(29:35):
were experiencing negative emotions, when men sniffed those tears, they
had reduced levels of testosterone, and they had reduced self
rated uh sexual arousal and reduced physiological measures of arousal.
And so what some headlines did with this is basically
they went with like the sexual angle and said that, oh, yeah,
(29:56):
tears will make you less attractive. Yeah, that feels like
a very a specific misread of of what they're trying
to say here, right, right. So, actually I was reading
there was a section that covered this in that article
by Mandy Oaklander that I mentioned a minute ago, and
it actually went back and interviewed one of the authors
of that that study in Science, Noam Sobel, who said, Okay, yeah,
(30:18):
it really generated some sort of misleading headlines that that
had the wrong takeaway from it, because even though they
did find that at least within this one studied emotional
tears lowered sexual arousal and men, he thinks that the
real interpretation, the correct interpretation of this finding is that
is that the chemo signals in this maybe reducing aggression, uh,
(30:43):
and that that men's tears may also have the same
effect as women's tears. And so the main takeaway would
not be that like tears are unattractive. It would be that,
like tears, if this finding is correct, serve to sort
of like put other biological draw vibes on hold and
sort of put put the men who smell them into
(31:04):
a kind of uh, caregiving mode. Now, one thing that
when possible issue that this raises for me though, is
that tears are also shed in rage, you know, so
one can easily imagine a scenario where if if one
warrior is coming at another and one warrior, uh, their
eyes are streaming with tears and their their faces snarling
(31:25):
like a beast, and they're coming at you with battle axe. Uh.
Is does that mean the other warrior is going to
suddenly let their guard down and and have this emotional
outpouring for the other warrior because tears are present like
that doesn't really match up for me? No, and it well,
I mean sure if it does work this way, certainly
wouldn't be that deterministic. It would just be an influence,
(31:46):
not like a you know, overriding every other consideration a
person could have. Though, I mean I would say that, Uh,
you can imagine even in a context of of people
of you know, warriors and killers, it seems is harder
to enact violence maybe on somebody who is crying like that.
Crying does serve pretty often to sort of neutralize aggression. Yeah.
(32:10):
But but then again, I guess we have to remember
that it does not occur in a vacuum. Like we
have the human facial communication array, we have body posture. Uh,
and you know that is also augmented by us or
or or non use of tools and weapons, like there's
there there are a number of other signals that would
be in place in addition to the tears. Even if
(32:31):
the tears had this ability to augment what's going on
with the with the our facial features. Yeah, I mean,
we're constantly processing all kinds of signals and information. Tears
would be one input among many. You know, they might
have an influence in one way, but you know you
might be able to ignore that influence if you've got
strong motivations. Uh. In all this, like, I can't help
(32:54):
but be reminded of an old Halloween Disney cartoon. Perhaps
you've seen it, in which there is a paging gorilla
and um and Donald Duck is there, and the Huey
Dewy and Louis are there, and they're running around being
chased by this gorilla. They're they're able to eventually subdue
the gorilla using tear gas. Tear gas, of course, has
(33:15):
does not have an emotional context. It isn't It is
an irritant. But in this cartoon, when the gas of
the tear, when the tear gas reaches the eyes of
both Duck and Ape, it produces tears that are then
instantly emotional tears confusing the categories. Yeah, yeah, there's some
some some wonderful category confusion there. So anyway, I'm not
(33:45):
sure what I think about the idea of tears as
chemo signals, though I do feel pretty well convinced that
there are some kind of signal, and it might be
a signal of the more the more straightforward kind that
we were talking about before we're observing them has some
pretty reliable cognitive effects. People see the tears and react
in a certain way. And and there are some indications
also that UM that tears, maybe emotional tears, may be
(34:10):
specially designed to be seen. Like I was reading in
one of these articles UM a finding that has alleged
that emotional tears tend to contain higher protein content than
um uh than just like basil or reflex tears. Though
that I'm not sure how well that finding holds up,
because I might have read that that had been that
(34:31):
had been contradicted as well. But if that is the case, UM,
one hypothesized explanation for that is that the additional protein
content of the tears causes them to be thicker, meaning
that they take longer to roll down the cheek so
emotional tears, if this is true, would be more visible
than just say, like your eyes overflowing with tears because
(34:52):
they're irritated. Those thinner tears might just sort of wash away,
whereas the emotion, the thicker emotional tears hang on the
cheek and sort of stick to your skin and other
people can see them more easily. Now this is very
interesting because it brings to mind two different things. One,
what happens when there is makeup of some sort in
(35:13):
place on the face, uh, And you can see this,
you know, across the spectrum any kind of uh makeup
that might be worn on the face, especially for some
sort of ritual scenario. And then if there's weeping, it
has the potential to make the tears all the more apparent.
And this also reminds me of something I was reading
in Holy Tears. Apparently there have been accounts of of
(35:36):
there are various accounts of weeping blood um in in
in cultures, and there was there's this possibility that there
there are some mourners that have been reported to have
engaged in rituals in ancient Turkey where they would score
their faces um during the ritual before the ritual and anyway,
the result would be that you would have blood and
(35:57):
tears mixed together. Uh, thus sort augmenting the tears with
blood and or or the reverse augmenting the blood with
tears causing this this increased flow. Well, yeah, and playing
on the intuition that tears are are meaningful, and they're
meaningful if they are seen. They're meant to be visually seen,
and of course the one way to hide them is
(36:18):
you do you're crying in the rain, right like in
the Affily Brothers song. Okay, you know, there's one observation
that I came across that struck me as really interesting.
This was not from a scientific study. Actually just heard
this in a video I was watching. So Vox has
a video series called Glad You Asked that's hosted by
(36:38):
somebody somebody named Joss Fong, and they had an episode
on tears, and there was a part in the episode
where somebody observed that tears are the only body fluid
that doesn't tend to gross other people out. And that
struck me as really interesting. So the idea of getting
somebody else's urine or feces, blood, sweat, spit, mucus, etcetera,
(37:01):
any of that getting any of that on you most
of the time people would find all of these options disgusting.
The the suggestion here is that tears are the only
fluid secreted by the body that doesn't usually provoke a
disgust reaction in others. And I don't know of any
empirical research to back up this observation. It might exist,
(37:22):
but it does ring true to me, and it strikes
me as as notable. Yeah, yeah, um, I mean it's hard.
It's hard to reflect on any actual experience with that.
I feel like any time that I've gotten, say, my
son's tears on me, it's almost always been their emotional tears.
(37:42):
Then there's gonna be mucus as well, you know, so
in that case it's like, yeah, I probably need to
change shirts. But but but once you're apparent, you get
all kinds of fluids on you, and that just I think,
you know, oh yeah, yeah, from urine and everything else.
But I guess with you know, with the with the tears,
I can I can unders understand that. Yeah, I can
(38:03):
certainly match u, especially when I think about the time
that he shot tears into my mouth. Um, by virtue
of his tear Duck situation. At the time, I was
not it was more interesting as opposed to to a
gross out moment um. I also was looking around because
I was thinking, well, maybe there's some notable exception in
human culture, and I thought I had some like some
(38:23):
flag came up in my memory of some faint, faint
example of something where maybe tears had some sort of
a negative connotation, maybe involved with say like um, you know,
the pershing of bodily energies or the imbalance of energies.
But I couldn't find anything. Maybe I'll find something and
we'll share in the future. But it does seem to
be pretty universal, and even then it would not I
(38:45):
don't know if it would necessarily be that the tears
themselves have any kind of unclean aspect to them. It
would be something about like the deeper body or the
or some sort of alleged energy system of the body.
In the same way, whereas if you if you might
and I'm not saying this is fair, but if you
were judgmental of somebody for crying during space jam, um
(39:07):
adult crying during space jam, you might you might well
argue that this that they shouldn't have done so, uh,
that they didn't have proper emotional reason to do so,
But you wouldn't think anything less with the actual substance
of their tears, Like, keep those space Jam tears away
from me, do not let them soil my body. I
wouldn't trust anybody who did not cry during Space Jam.
(39:30):
You go, maybe they're the hole of these tears. All. Yeah,
as long as we're off the subject and reaching the
end of the podcast, what have you? What do you
make of old Pinhead saying, um, you know, no, no tears.
It's a waste of good suffering. I always felt that
safe old tears. Yeah, I always felt like that was
a bit off brand, Like what do you what are you?
What are you expecting to happen? Like I thought pain
and suffering was your whole bag, but suddenly like crying
(39:52):
is not allowed. Yeah, at what point does he think
it's okay for the tears to begin? Yeah, it seems
kind of closed minded pin it. Well, it is interesting
that in the context of the movie, these would be uh,
if it's hell Raiser, these would be anticipatory tears, right,
tears that are in response to terror at the idea
of suffering yet to come. And yet there are some
(40:14):
people who have put forward models of emotional tears that
sort of say the opposite, that say tears are a
sort of step down the signal. I'm not sure I'm
convinced by this actually, but it at least has been alleged.
I could imagine a scenario. Okay, if you're gonna think
long and hard about the cenobytes of of Clive Barker
(40:36):
cell raiser, you could say, well, they're all about actual senses,
actual senses of of pleasure and pain, and therefore the
emotional context of pleasure and pain might be completely lost
on them, because yeah, they're all about like stick and
hooks and things and and so forth, and and the
tightening of leather, not so much about anticipating the pain
(40:58):
or reflecting on the pain. So I don't know, now
I'm back backtracking. Maybe it is totally on brand, but
maybe maybe would have been more impactful if if ten
had had been said something like just to express that
he doesn't even understand what's happening. What are you doing? Why?
Why is there liquid coming out of your face? Liquid
shouldn't be coming out of your body unless it is
a response to direct physical stimuli. Since I mentioned it,
(41:22):
I figured I might as well explain the idea of
the sort of step down theory of tears. Um So.
I was reading about this in an article in The
Washington Post from April sixteen by Mary Kim called the
Science of a Good Cry, and this involved an interview
with an emeritus professor of psychology at Temple University named J. E. Ron,
(41:43):
who had advocated what was called in this article a
two stage theory of emotional tears, which would be kind
of similar to the two stage theory of laughter, which
posits that maybe laughter functions when tension is first raised
by the setup of a joke and then suddenly lowered
by the punch lines that stepped down to the lower
level of tension. Under this theory, that causes the laughter
(42:06):
as the result of a joke. Uh The idea here
is that maybe crying works in a similar fashion. Uh So,
I want to read a quote from this article that's
explaining a friend's view here. Uh. Quote, people experience a
crying fit when something happens to first spark high anxiety
or distress, followed by a moment of recalibration or release.
(42:26):
For instance, a child that loses his mother at the
grocery store. Begins by frantically searching for her, getting more
and more worried as he scans the aisles. Suddenly he
hears her call his name from behind, sees her comforting face,
and promptly bursts into tears. And uh and uh. It
goes on to explain how this could maybe also work
for things that appear to be tears of joy. Um,
(42:50):
maybe like while you're planning a wedding for your child,
you know they're there's sort of a high anxiety, high
stress preparation stage, but then during the ceremony itself, it's
kind of everything is culminated and then there's a release
of tension and then you cry. So, according to this
this hypothesis here, emotional tears would occur not really at
the onset of distress, but at the onset of relief
(43:13):
from distress. I'm not sure how convinced I am by this.
I'm not sure how well it lines up with actual
instances of crying, but it does seem to be somewhat corroborated,
at least by um what parts of the nervous system
seem to be activated, like crying does seem to be
more associated with activation of the parasympathetic nervous system as
(43:36):
opposed to the sympathetic nervous system. So the sympathetic nervous
system is what's usually associated with high stress conditions, fight
or flight, goose bumps, all that kind of thing. And
then usually when you when you're done with a sympathetic
nervous system response, you know, the the high stress is subsided,
you shift back down into activation of the parasympathetic nervous system,
(43:57):
which is often known as the relax and restore war
system or the rest and digest system. It's the stuff
that's uh normal, involuntary activities of the body that are
happening when you're not in a state of heightened stress
or anxiety. And this is the system that crying seems
to be more associated with. Uh So, so that would
be an interesting indication in favor of this this two
(44:18):
stage emotional tier theory. But still I'm not sure how
correctly the theory rings. Just with experience of wind crying
happens and how it happens. Yeah, I mean, it just
it becomes so complex when you start trying to tease
a part you know, emotional and physical responses to you know,
often you know complex stimuli. That is, you know, this
(44:40):
is something kind of thing that you know, Pinhead's not
gonna understand. It's just a it's a it's a tangled
knot of human emotion. Oh we did, We did get
set off on that whole thing, but Pinhead didn't. We
we did, we did. Alright, Well, on that note, we're
gonna go ahead and close out this part two of
our look at Tears. We are going to come back
with part three, and I'm excited to get into some
(45:01):
of the mythological and religious stuff a bit more in
that one, but there will be a short gap. We
have a special interview episode that we're excited about that's
gonna air Tuesday, and then the following Thursday, we should
be back with Tears Part three. If all goes according
to plan. Yeah, if it doesn't, that means something changed.
There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Yes, we'll
(45:23):
have to get into that. What's with all the teeth gnashing?
I don't know. Maybe we'll get into that in part three.
What does nash ing mean? What is it? What is
it to nash to bite to like grind your teeth?
I was just imagine that. Yeah, just kind of like
weeping and just you know, um, so perhaps we should
explore that, maybe maybe there there's some legs to that question.
(45:45):
Experts on gnashing right in. Yeah, all right. If you
want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow
Your Mind, you'll find them all on the Stuff to
Blow your Mind podcast feed, which you can find wherever
you get your podcast. We have core episodes in two
season Thursdays, Artifact on Wednesday, listener Mail on Monday, Weird
House set Him on Friday. That's when we just kick
back and discuss a weird movie, and then on the
(46:06):
weekend we have a rerun of a core episode. Huge
thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, just to say hello, you
can email us at contact. That's Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production
(46:34):
of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for My Heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're
listening to your favorite shows.
My Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of
My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. This is Robert Lamp and this is Joe McCormick,
and we're back with part two of our series on tears.
We figured out by today this is definitely going to
(00:22):
be at least three parts because there's just so much
that you know that the tears make an ocean and
and uh, and they don't stop coming, so so there
will be at least one more. Yeah, there's really there's
almost too much. Because sometimes we look into things and
we're like, okay, what is the what's the mythological ramifications
of this? Are there any treatments of this and mythology
(00:42):
or religion? And with something like tears, the answer is
is yes, every religion, every mythology pretty much, you know. Um,
so it's easy to get lost sort of just trade,
you know, chasing some of these ideas down and then
trying to figure out what which ones are worth talking
about which ones are not. And then of course from
the scientific point of view there uh, we've already rolled
(01:03):
through I think some of the science of tears, and
we have a bit more to cover today. Well, We've
got a lot more to cover on the science of tears.
In the last episode, we talked some about some of
the basic, uncontroversial biological facts about tears, you know, like
basal tears and reflex tears, what they're made of and
and how how they're secreted from the lacrimal glands, and
(01:24):
what they normally do. But the big question, the big
sort of mystery about tears, is this question of human
emotional tears. Humans appear to be the only animal that
sheds tears as a response to emotional states, and so
one of the huge questions is why, what is the
biological purpose and thus what is the evolutionary justification unique
(01:49):
to our species of liquid coming out of your eyes
in response to feeling emotions. As we talked about in
the last episode. You know, because this is not a
settled question, there are just there tons of hypotheses that
have been put forward over the years. We talked in
the last episode about several very unlikely ones, for example,
(02:10):
tears being a byproduct of an alleged aquatic ape past
for human beings. This is almost certainly not correct because
we don't put much stock in the aquatic ap hypothesis
Another one is this idea that maybe tears are somehow
derived from a conditioned response of our ancient ancestors to
getting smoke in their eyes at funeral pyres after they
(02:30):
started controlling fire. There are several reasons we talked about
in the last episode by that that's probably not correct either.
So over the next couple of episodes, we're going to
be exploring a bunch more of the existing hypotheses about
the evolutionary purpose of emotional tears. And I think you
can sort these into three broad categories. The first being
there there is no purpose, maybe they're just some kind
(02:52):
of byproduct, the second being the purpose is intra personal,
meaning internal to the body of the person who's crying.
And then the third would be that the purpose is interpersonal,
meaning that tears serve some kind of external or relational function. Now,
on the score of no purpose explanations, here's the kind
(03:14):
of surprising fact. Apparently, Charles Darwin actually believed that emotional
tears served no purpose of their own, but rather were
a byproduct of other purposeful adaptations, notably facial expressions and
vocal expressions. In his eighteen seventy two book The Expression
of Emotions, in Man and Animals, uh Darwin wrote, quote,
(03:36):
the shedding of tears appears to have originated through reflex
action from the spasmodic contraction of the eyelids, together perhaps
with the eyeballs becoming gorged with blood during the act
of screaming. Therefore, weeping probably came on rather late in
the line of our descent. And this conclusion agrees with
the fact that our nearest allies, the nthropomorphous apes, do
(03:58):
not weep. So the second observation there being that that
the other apes that were most closely related to they
do produce tears, of course basal tears in their eyes
and irritant tears, but they don't produce emotional tears. So
that observation is correct. But I think Darwin's influenced in
the in the first half of that paragraph there is
almost definitely wrong. His idea is that, well, when we
(04:20):
get upset, we cry out with our voices, and this
makes like blood rushed to the face because you're screaming,
and maybe all the blood sort of makes your eyes swell,
and then they're Also when you're upset, there are facial
muscle contractions like involuntary reflexive contractions of things like the eyelids,
and this just sort of squeezes tears out as an
(04:41):
accidental byproduct. I don't think I can go with Darwin
on this one. This sounds really wrong. Yeah, I mean,
I mean, on one hand, we've already talked about the
various sounds and screaming type uh effects that you see
with with other primates. I mean, if you've been to
a zoo or you've been to a natural environment where
(05:03):
primates make their home, you may have heard this. So
that they are there, they can create the kind of
screaming that I guess could theoretically cause the eyeballs to
become gorged with blood. So that doesn't seem to have
much weight to it. Yeah, it's not that it would
be impossible for contractions of the facial muscles to cause tears.
I do think this may even be an explanation. I've
(05:24):
seen this invoked as an explanation for why sometimes your
eyes get teary when you yawn. Like when you yawn,
that may put some kind of pressure on the lachrymal
glands that causes some excessive tearing, which you know it
leads to blurring of the vision. After you're done yawning,
and then you might need to wipe your eyes, maybe
a similar thing with coughing. So it's it's not impossible
that contractions of the facial muscles could cause some tearing.
(05:47):
It just seems like the tears being produced by the
lachrymal glands during an emotional episode or something that exceeds this,
this kind of tearing. Um and uh And I don't know,
most researchers who focus on this area really do think
that this is not a plausible explanation. It seems pretty
clear that tears are a true adaptive trait that serve
(06:07):
their own functions and function independently from just the contractions
of the facial muscles. Because another question would be like, well, okay,
if this is true for humans, how come other like
apes that were closely related to don't also cry when
they contract their facial muscles in in emotional episodes. Yeah.
Like I said, it seems like we just have we
have more evidence to the contrary at this point. Yeah,
(06:29):
so it seems like tears are probably purposeful, a true
adaptive trait of some kind. So the next category would be, well,
maybe tears have some kind of intra personal purpose. They
do something within the body, within the self, uh. And
there are many ways of approaching this, but to cite
a characteristic example of this type of explanation, I wanted
(06:51):
to look at the detoxification hypothesis. This is one that
used to be pretty popular but has really fallen out
of favor historically. I think this is one of the
most popular hypotheses for for explaining the function of tears.
It was advanced by the American biochemist William Fry in
the nineteen eighties, I think first published in nineteen eighty five,
(07:12):
I believe and Fry's reasoning went like this, Okay, when
humans are under stress, you're having some intense emotional you
know about of emotion, there is a build up of
potentially toxic substances in the blood. So you know, think
about all the different uh stress effects of stress you
learned about. You know, when when you're really distressed, your
(07:33):
your bloodstream floods with cortisol. You're you're freaked out. You
can almost kind of like feel it moving through your body,
or at least maybe it's an illusion, but I feel
like I can, like when I'm having a stressful experience,
there's almost a sematic sensation of the spreading of this
kind of like uh, aggravating numbness and fry positive that
(07:53):
when this happens, when your body fills up with all
these potentially toxic contaminants or horn stress hormones, things like that,
the body cleanses these excess contaminants by purging them through
the tear response, with the lachrymal glands acting like kidneys
do for the urinary system. So under this hypothesis, you
(08:14):
are you are peeing out your eyes when you are
really stressed. Yeah, and I can I can understand why
this idea, you know, had had some support behind it
because I mean, on one level, yes, we can look
to the kidneys in the urinary system and we can see, uh,
we can see something like this. But to your point,
(08:35):
the feeling of all this welling up inside of us
and then the what often feels like a release. And
I have to stress though that when when you get it,
look at different accounts of weeping, and depending on the
circumstances of the weeping, such as like solitary weeping versus
public weeping, and then that's going to depend on the
culture in the scenario in which is taking place. Um,
(08:56):
you do see a lot of accounts where people say, Okay,
I felt better after or I wept after. You know,
all this built up and then was released. Uh, so
we can under we could we can imagine where like
looking at this idea of what the urinary system is doing,
thinking about how we feel before and after an emotional outburst,
we could easily fall in line with thinking like, yeah, yeah,
(09:18):
those that that was the top the toxins building up
in my body, and I am letting the toxins out.
Weeping is just the body releasing the poison. Yeah. Yeah,
this is having a sort of like chemical read on
the feeling of catharsis people uh sometimes experience from weeping. Uh. Now,
of course I should say before I move on that
this hypothesis does not have much support among any modern
(09:41):
tear response researchers. I was reading it seems like the
evidence for it is not good. It has been strongly
pushed back against. But like you're saying, it does have
this intuitive appeal because there is a widespread belief in
the healing power of tears. I actually I came across
the stat that I found astounding. So I was reading
an article in Time magazine by Mandy Oaklander from sixteen
(10:03):
that was about interviewed several different researchers who work on
the subject of tears, and it's cited one analysis that
looked at a bunch of articles about crying in the
media over a period of more than a hundred years,
so going way back, and it found that nine four
percent of them described crying as in some way good
(10:24):
for the mind and body, and or described holding back
tears as bad for the mind and body. And yet
despite this gut feeling that people seem to have, I mean,
I feel this way too. It's it's a common belief.
This this this gut feeling that tears bring catharsis and
relief and they heal you. They're good for you, they
heal the mind and body. Evidence for this is apparently
(10:47):
pretty scarce on the ground. The same article by Oaklander
in Times cites a researcher named Jonathan Rottenberg, who is
a professor of psychology at the University of South Florida
who studies emotion and is on work with tears, and
Rodenberg says that these claims about the healing power of
tears are basically a fable there's just not much evidence
(11:08):
that crying has strong measurable benefits to health, mental or physical,
or that it predictably brings relief or catharsis. I mean,
obviously it does bring a feeling of relief sometimes. I
think we all know that from experience, but maybe not
as consistently as we tend to infer. Yeah, one example,
because some some of us might be you know, you
might wonder, well, okay, what's an example of tears not
(11:30):
having a beneficial effect. One example was brought up, I
think this was in Holy Tears, was that some people,
when queried on this, they mentioned that if they are
weeping out of a feeling of loneliness and they are
doing so in a solitary setting, that they may feel
worse afterwards, which which I think is interesting and I
think that can potentially shed light on some other theories
(11:54):
or potentially provide um some possible evidence for supporting other
hypotheses concerning the reason that we have tears, the function
of tears and human in the human condition. Right, Well,
I'm going to get to this in a minute, but
I think this would be one of the many things
that I would interpret as as possibly pointing to tears
(12:15):
serving a primarily interpersonal function in communication and signaling between
people exactly. Yeah, yeah, you can interpret it as meaning, well,
you know that you did not feel better, because the
the act of weeping is supposed to be communicating something
to another human being. Yeah, and it is supposed to
(12:35):
elicit a response from some But okay, so, so that
addresses the question of like subjective feelings of relief. You know,
sometimes people feel feelings of relief after crying, sometimes people don't.
But the other half of this, this intra personal interpretation,
you know it does does crying do something for you,
make to make your body better in some way, to
(12:56):
give you some kind of internal benefit. The other question
would be like, are there measurable ways that crying can
be found to improve well being apart from just the
the sort of immediate aftermath where you might feel a
feeling of relief or not. What about other types of
measures of physical and mental well being? Well, there was
one study I came across that looked into this question,
(13:18):
and it was by Hez Door for Vinger Hoots. That's
that's add Vingerhoots, So I mentioned in the previous episode,
and who will come up several more times in this
and Michael R. Tremble in eighteen called social and psychological
consequences of not crying possible associations with psychopathology and therapeutic relevance,
And basically, the authors were trying to look into the
(13:41):
question of okay, so that, um, what if you find
people who report that they essentially never cried after a
certain period in their life, they feel like they either
lost the ability to cry or just at some point
in their life they just stopped crying and just don't
cry anymore. Um, can we compare their out comes in
terms of standard measures of well being and social functioning
(14:04):
compared to people who do cry on a regular basis.
So they interviewed Auzy Hausborne because no more tears, that
would have been good, But now so they say quote.
Study participants included four hundred and seventy five people who
reportedly lost the capacity to cry and a hundred and
seventy nine normal control criers. Applied measures assessed crying, well being, empathy, attachment,
(14:28):
social support, and connection with others, and the authors had
hypothesized that people who don't cry would have lower well
being and poor social functioning compared to people who do cry. Uh,
and actually that's not exactly what they found. So they
did find some differences. So people who did not cry,
on average had fewer social connections and less social support,
(14:52):
and also had somewhat less empathy, though of course that's
not going to apply to everybody, and it's worth noting
that those things I just mentioned aren't necessarily a result
of not crying, but could maybe be causes of not crying,
or could maybe be correlates with similar underlying causes. Um.
But what they did what they did not find was
(15:13):
indications of lower well being. In turns, it actually found
that people who cry and people who don't cry were
about the same in terms of psychological measures of well being,
so you know, no more measurable depression, anxiety, and so forth.
Thank thank now. Studies like this don't mean that we
(15:35):
can be sure tears serve no intra personal purposes. You
certainly can't rule it out. Tears may well serve some
kind of purpose within the self, within the body, But personally,
I've become pretty well convinced while researching for these episodes
that the primary adaptive purpose of emotional tears is interpersonal,
meaning it's external, it's social, and relational and that tears
(15:59):
are prime merely for communicating something too and affecting the
behavior of other members of our species other people. Yeah,
I I after reading through Holy Tears, I I also
feel like this is a very strong hypothesis, uh, in
how they discuss the role of tears and religious rights
(16:22):
and rituals. But but one area that I do have
questions about would be, uh, the weeping during media um,
like during a film or something. You know. Uh, I
wonder if that is the same like when we weep
during motion pictures. Is that a communal experience or is
that a personal experience? Are we actually trying to communicate
(16:43):
something to other people viewing the film? Oh? Well, I
mean it wouldn't have to be It wouldn't have to
be intentional on your part. I mean, weeping is often involuntary.
It's usually involuntary, So weeping at a movie I think
could very well be not something you're trying to do
because you are in penstionally communicating with say the movie,
or with other people you're watching the movie with. But
instead it's a standard kind of response to um empathetic
(17:08):
connection with drama you are seeing unfold and your brain
can't really tell the difference between drama in media versus
drama that would be going on with people in your life.
So an adaptation that arises because it's useful with some
some kind of social signaling function for other people also
gets hijacked when you're watching a movie about people. That's true.
(17:29):
So basically what we're talking about here would be it's
like the old example of the train coming at the
screen and early movie go where it's like freaking out,
like ah, this the train is approaching. You jump because
it is uh, it is something that it is stimuli
that should cause you to jump and run away. But
the tearful scene, the emotional scene in an emotion picture,
(17:50):
that is something that is uh, that is more subtle,
and we're just going to respond to it as if
it is something that we should perhaps communally be responding to. Yeah.
I think the same way that a scary movie partially
simulates the feeling of real danger, or that a romantic
movie can cause some kind of romantic arousal. I mean,
it's all like, uh, there's a vicarious uh interaction with
(18:12):
what's going on in the media as if it were
taking place in real life. For a moment, I'd like
to come back to something we were talking about earlier,
the uh, the the hypothesis that there is a purging
of toxins going on during weeping, because this reminds me
of another topic we've discussed in the show before sweating. Uh.
You also see some of this, um, some of this
(18:36):
line of thinking being employed with sweating, sometimes with exercise,
but I've seen it particularly with with sauna traditions. Why
do people feel better after a sauna? What is a
sauna doing? And you do see this sometimes there is
this argument, well, when you're sweating, you're in the sauna,
you release toxins. Uh. But I, if memory serves the
(18:58):
situation is though when you look at like how much
is shed via sweating versus how much is truly shed
via urination? Um, there's just a huge gulf between those numbers. Uh.
So it doesn't really match up, but it but it
becomes difficult to untangle uh this not you know, concerning
how much is purge via sweating, how much is how
(19:18):
much would need to be purged to make a meaningful
impact on your physiology, and how much we feel or
believe we have purged having gone through the experience. Yeah,
it's funny. I'm also skeptical of the idea that this
is why people feel a relief and after sweating or
being in the song. I would expect probably it has
more to do with I don't know, the pleasurable hormones
(19:40):
that people get after, you know, exercise or something like that,
maybe endorphins or something of that nature. Um, I don't know.
I'm just spitballing there. But but yeah, I would be
skeptical of that. And it's funny that what you say
is um parallel to some arguments that are made against
the detoxification hypothesis of tears, because um, much like with
(20:00):
your sweating example, there's probably just not enough of the
stuff in the tears to really make a major difference
in the body. But but but in the next episode,
I think we're going to get more into the direct
formulations of some of the main contending hypotheses for for
explaining the biological evolution of tears. That that will be
more in the next episode. But I did want to
talk about some some broad observations in the idea of
(20:23):
tears as an external or interpersonal adaptation, something that is
that serves a relational function and one piece of evidence
that seemed somewhat convincing to me that tears serve an
external and communicative purpose is that people just automatically, when
they observed tears, interpret them as conveying information about the
(20:46):
emotional states of the person who's crying. And it's not
just that you look at a person who's who's crying
and you say that person is sad. The tears themselves
seem to convey very important information. And this was illustrated
in some research I was reading about in a two
thousand ten NPR article by Alison Aubrey called Teary Eyed Evolution,
(21:07):
Crying serves a Purpose, and this featured an interview with
the researcher named Randolph Cornelius, who was a professor of
psychology at Vassar College. Uh. I'm citing this research in
particular because it came with what I thought was a
very useful visual aid. Um so so Cornelius, the psychologist
he he, he is arguing that tears are useful because
(21:27):
they convey information, and his research did something pretty clever.
It took photographs of people who were crying and then
digitally manipulated them to remove the tears. So you'd have
the same face with the same expression when the person
is crying, except without any tears visible in the eyes
or on the cheeks. And what the study found is
(21:49):
that people rated the same faces without tears as much
more ambiguous. People consistently interpret tearful faces as sad, and
they interpret them as having stronger emotional value. But people
have a lot more difficulty inferring the feelings of those
(22:10):
same faces without the tears. And so, to quote from
Cornelius as as cited in this article, he says, quote,
tears also narrow the range of emotions people think the
models are experiencing. Tearful people are mostly seen as experiencing
emotions in the sadness family, sadness, grief, morning, and so forth.
(22:30):
And Robert, I really, once I looked at these images,
it really hit home for me, because, yeah, so it
will have two faces side by side. One is a
crying face and the other is the same exact face,
but photoshop to have the tears removed and the faces
without tears. Whereas there's like one in the middle of
a man crying with tears rolling down his cheeks and
(22:51):
he looks very sad. And in the picture right next
to him, without the tears, the same expression looks possibly
kind of like smug or defiant. Yeah, I thought, kind
of menacing. Like without the tears the tears removed, he
kind of looks like I like he thinking I might
just beat you up. But in the first one, it's
it's clear this man has been watching a sad football
movie and weeping openly. Uh. There's one that you shared
(23:14):
above this of a child or I think it's a
child looking up um, and with the tears are removed,
it seems like they're perhaps just looking at a bird
flying through the air, but with the tears, it's like
they are looking up at a crucifixion. Yeah. Yeah, The
same face without the tears could be interpreted is kind
of like, um, I don't know, maybe concerned, but also
(23:35):
displaying a possibly creepy kind of interest in something. Uh So, yeah,
at least to me, I immediately from these images can
see the informational value of tears. They radically reduce the
ambiguity in interpreting somebody else's facial expression, and and and
suddenly you're not wondering like what is this person thinking?
(23:57):
You immediately read them as like as kind of sad
and vulnerable and helpless and not dangerous, whereas the same
face without the tears is like, I don't know what's
up with this person? Now? Of course this is all this,
this all becomes more complicated when we we we think
about some of the exceptions to this this rule that
(24:18):
pop up, you know, regarding quinted person could be uh,
a teary eyed you know, perhaps they have some sort
of a tear gland situation going on, or perhaps there
is some sort of irritant in the air, um, something
of that nature. Perhaps they're their sinuses are are bothering them,
or they just yawned. But if you're just looking at them,
you're you're going to instantly go to that something something
(24:40):
powerful or bad has happened and this person may need
comfort in you know. This got me thinking about, um,
another way that tears might work. This is not something
that I found advocated in in any research, though somebody
might have put this forward and I haven't read about
it yet. Um, but this would be uh the idea
that what if tears are you useful as an honest
(25:01):
signal of emotions? That could have evolved as a response
to the evolution of deceit so uh so, So what
I'm imagining here is, you know, humans are are complex
social animals managing complex social relationships, and human brains are
complex enough that humans can lie about what they feel,
(25:26):
and they can lie about who and what they care about.
But because tears are difficult to fake, I wonder if
maybe tears evolved as an honest signal of our true,
motivating feelings, who and what we actually care about and
how we feel about things. And thus I wonder if,
possibly in that way, they could be adaptive because they
(25:48):
make us more trustworthy. A person who cries about something
is less likely to be lying about what their feelings
about that thing are. This, of course makes my mind
instantly go to actor. But that I mean, that's kind
of a whole discussion in and of itself, because you
get into how is the actor summoning the tears? Are
they engaging with with actual tearful memories, or you know,
(26:10):
a deep reading of the script and so forth. But
ultimately the result is when you watch a film and
the actor is summoning tears, it it makes anything that's
going on on the screen more believable, no matter how
poor the screenplay, no matter how weird the lighting. If
the actor is is summoning actual tears in their performance
(26:31):
like that, that gives it a leg up. Yeah, and
I think it's worth noting that like most people, like
some people can cry on command, but most people would
have a hard time doing that, Like it's not easy
to do unless you have that that chunk of onion
in your in your handkerchief. Right, Is that the older
actor's trick? Yeah, I guess so. So, yeah, maybe it
has something to do with the evolution of deceit. But anyway,
(26:53):
that's just sort of like a weird thought that popped
into my head. Maybe that'll connect to some of the
hypotheses that we that we discussing more detail in the
next part. But I wanted to talk about another study
that was interesting about ways that tears might be useful
for interpersonal signaling and behavior manipulation. And this would be
something that's not focused on conveying information that's perceived consciously,
(27:16):
like what we were talking about with looking at tears
on people's faces a minute ago. This would be operating
at a subconscious level on the basis of chemical signaling
or chemo signaling. This next example is also good because
from what I can tell, this is a study that
led to some maybe very misleading headlines in popular coverage.
But anyway, so some studies in mice have found that
(27:40):
behaviorally relevant chemo signals in tears. So these would not
be emotional tears because mice don't shed emotional tears. These
would just be regular basil or reflex tears. These chemo
signals in mice include pheromones that uh, for example, can
do things like make male mice more attractive as mates,
(28:02):
or there can be chemo signals in juvenile mice that
prevent adults from attempting unwanted mating behaviors with with those mice,
so that they can have kind of uh, discouraging unwanted
behaviors and other mice. And picking up on that research,
there were some scientists who in your two thousand eleven
looked into whether there could be similar chemo signals in
(28:25):
human tears, and so this led to a study by
Shanny Gelstein at All published in Science called human tears
contain a chemo signal. Now, I want to be clear
that I'm often kind of skeptical about I'm not quite
sure why this is, but I think maybe because Uh.
There have been a few studies along these lines that
have later turned out to be not well founded. But
(28:47):
I'm kind of skeptical about studies finding big macro behavioral
effects of imperceptible smells and stuff in humans, so I
would definitely want this verified by a good bit of
independent replication. But if this the finding of the study
is correct, what it found is that emotional tears in
humans tend to contain chemicals that change the behavior of adults,
(29:13):
especially adult men, possibly making them less aggressive and less
likely to experience sexual arousal, maybe making them more likely to, say,
provide care behaviors. The study measured this by having people
uh smell tears that were from from human donors, and
they found that tears that were produced by women who
(29:35):
were experiencing negative emotions, when men sniffed those tears, they
had reduced levels of testosterone, and they had reduced self
rated uh sexual arousal and reduced physiological measures of arousal.
And so what some headlines did with this is basically
they went with like the sexual angle and said that, oh, yeah,
(29:56):
tears will make you less attractive. Yeah, that feels like
a very a specific misread of of what they're trying
to say here, right, right. So, actually I was reading
there was a section that covered this in that article
by Mandy Oaklander that I mentioned a minute ago, and
it actually went back and interviewed one of the authors
of that that study in Science, Noam Sobel, who said, Okay, yeah,
(30:18):
it really generated some sort of misleading headlines that that
had the wrong takeaway from it, because even though they
did find that at least within this one studied emotional
tears lowered sexual arousal and men, he thinks that the
real interpretation, the correct interpretation of this finding is that
is that the chemo signals in this maybe reducing aggression, uh,
(30:43):
and that that men's tears may also have the same
effect as women's tears. And so the main takeaway would
not be that like tears are unattractive. It would be that,
like tears, if this finding is correct, serve to sort
of like put other biological draw vibes on hold and
sort of put put the men who smell them into
(31:04):
a kind of uh, caregiving mode. Now, one thing that
when possible issue that this raises for me though, is
that tears are also shed in rage, you know, so
one can easily imagine a scenario where if if one
warrior is coming at another and one warrior, uh, their
eyes are streaming with tears and their their faces snarling
(31:25):
like a beast, and they're coming at you with battle axe. Uh.
Is does that mean the other warrior is going to
suddenly let their guard down and and have this emotional
outpouring for the other warrior because tears are present like
that doesn't really match up for me? No, and it well,
I mean sure if it does work this way, certainly
wouldn't be that deterministic. It would just be an influence,
(31:46):
not like a you know, overriding every other consideration a
person could have. Though, I mean I would say that, Uh,
you can imagine even in a context of of people
of you know, warriors and killers, it seems is harder
to enact violence maybe on somebody who is crying like that.
Crying does serve pretty often to sort of neutralize aggression. Yeah.
(32:10):
But but then again, I guess we have to remember
that it does not occur in a vacuum. Like we
have the human facial communication array, we have body posture. Uh,
and you know that is also augmented by us or
or or non use of tools and weapons, like there's
there there are a number of other signals that would
be in place in addition to the tears. Even if
(32:31):
the tears had this ability to augment what's going on
with the with the our facial features. Yeah, I mean,
we're constantly processing all kinds of signals and information. Tears
would be one input among many. You know, they might
have an influence in one way, but you know you
might be able to ignore that influence if you've got
strong motivations. Uh. In all this, like, I can't help
(32:54):
but be reminded of an old Halloween Disney cartoon. Perhaps
you've seen it, in which there is a paging gorilla
and um and Donald Duck is there, and the Huey
Dewy and Louis are there, and they're running around being
chased by this gorilla. They're they're able to eventually subdue
the gorilla using tear gas. Tear gas, of course, has
(33:15):
does not have an emotional context. It isn't It is
an irritant. But in this cartoon, when the gas of
the tear, when the tear gas reaches the eyes of
both Duck and Ape, it produces tears that are then
instantly emotional tears confusing the categories. Yeah, yeah, there's some
some some wonderful category confusion there. So anyway, I'm not
(33:45):
sure what I think about the idea of tears as
chemo signals, though I do feel pretty well convinced that
there are some kind of signal, and it might be
a signal of the more the more straightforward kind that
we were talking about before we're observing them has some
pretty reliable cognitive effects. People see the tears and react
in a certain way. And and there are some indications
also that UM that tears, maybe emotional tears, may be
(34:10):
specially designed to be seen. Like I was reading in
one of these articles UM a finding that has alleged
that emotional tears tend to contain higher protein content than
um uh than just like basil or reflex tears. Though
that I'm not sure how well that finding holds up,
because I might have read that that had been that
(34:31):
had been contradicted as well. But if that is the case, UM,
one hypothesized explanation for that is that the additional protein
content of the tears causes them to be thicker, meaning
that they take longer to roll down the cheek so
emotional tears, if this is true, would be more visible
than just say, like your eyes overflowing with tears because
(34:52):
they're irritated. Those thinner tears might just sort of wash away,
whereas the emotion, the thicker emotional tears hang on the
cheek and sort of stick to your skin and other
people can see them more easily. Now this is very
interesting because it brings to mind two different things. One,
what happens when there is makeup of some sort in
(35:13):
place on the face, uh, And you can see this,
you know, across the spectrum any kind of uh makeup
that might be worn on the face, especially for some
sort of ritual scenario. And then if there's weeping, it
has the potential to make the tears all the more apparent.
And this also reminds me of something I was reading
in Holy Tears. Apparently there have been accounts of of
(35:36):
there are various accounts of weeping blood um in in
in cultures, and there was there's this possibility that there
there are some mourners that have been reported to have
engaged in rituals in ancient Turkey where they would score
their faces um during the ritual before the ritual and anyway,
the result would be that you would have blood and
(35:57):
tears mixed together. Uh, thus sort augmenting the tears with
blood and or or the reverse augmenting the blood with
tears causing this this increased flow. Well, yeah, and playing
on the intuition that tears are are meaningful, and they're
meaningful if they are seen. They're meant to be visually seen,
and of course the one way to hide them is
(36:18):
you do you're crying in the rain, right like in
the Affily Brothers song. Okay, you know, there's one observation
that I came across that struck me as really interesting.
This was not from a scientific study. Actually just heard
this in a video I was watching. So Vox has
a video series called Glad You Asked that's hosted by
(36:38):
somebody somebody named Joss Fong, and they had an episode
on tears, and there was a part in the episode
where somebody observed that tears are the only body fluid
that doesn't tend to gross other people out. And that
struck me as really interesting. So the idea of getting
somebody else's urine or feces, blood, sweat, spit, mucus, etcetera,
(37:01):
any of that getting any of that on you most
of the time people would find all of these options disgusting.
The the suggestion here is that tears are the only
fluid secreted by the body that doesn't usually provoke a
disgust reaction in others. And I don't know of any
empirical research to back up this observation. It might exist,
(37:22):
but it does ring true to me, and it strikes
me as as notable. Yeah, yeah, um, I mean it's hard.
It's hard to reflect on any actual experience with that.
I feel like any time that I've gotten, say, my
son's tears on me, it's almost always been their emotional tears.
(37:42):
Then there's gonna be mucus as well, you know, so
in that case it's like, yeah, I probably need to
change shirts. But but but once you're apparent, you get
all kinds of fluids on you, and that just I think,
you know, oh yeah, yeah, from urine and everything else.
But I guess with you know, with the with the tears,
I can I can unders understand that. Yeah, I can
(38:03):
certainly match u, especially when I think about the time
that he shot tears into my mouth. Um, by virtue
of his tear Duck situation. At the time, I was
not it was more interesting as opposed to to a
gross out moment um. I also was looking around because
I was thinking, well, maybe there's some notable exception in
human culture, and I thought I had some like some
(38:23):
flag came up in my memory of some faint, faint
example of something where maybe tears had some sort of
a negative connotation, maybe involved with say like um, you know,
the pershing of bodily energies or the imbalance of energies.
But I couldn't find anything. Maybe I'll find something and
we'll share in the future. But it does seem to
be pretty universal, and even then it would not I
(38:45):
don't know if it would necessarily be that the tears
themselves have any kind of unclean aspect to them. It
would be something about like the deeper body or the
or some sort of alleged energy system of the body.
In the same way, whereas if you if you might
and I'm not saying this is fair, but if you
were judgmental of somebody for crying during space jam, um
(39:07):
adult crying during space jam, you might you might well
argue that this that they shouldn't have done so, uh,
that they didn't have proper emotional reason to do so,
But you wouldn't think anything less with the actual substance
of their tears, Like, keep those space Jam tears away
from me, do not let them soil my body. I
wouldn't trust anybody who did not cry during Space Jam.
(39:30):
You go, maybe they're the hole of these tears. All. Yeah,
as long as we're off the subject and reaching the
end of the podcast, what have you? What do you
make of old Pinhead saying, um, you know, no, no tears.
It's a waste of good suffering. I always felt that
safe old tears. Yeah, I always felt like that was
a bit off brand, Like what do you what are you?
What are you expecting to happen? Like I thought pain
and suffering was your whole bag, but suddenly like crying
(39:52):
is not allowed. Yeah, at what point does he think
it's okay for the tears to begin? Yeah, it seems
kind of closed minded pin it. Well, it is interesting
that in the context of the movie, these would be uh,
if it's hell Raiser, these would be anticipatory tears, right,
tears that are in response to terror at the idea
of suffering yet to come. And yet there are some
(40:14):
people who have put forward models of emotional tears that
sort of say the opposite, that say tears are a
sort of step down the signal. I'm not sure I'm
convinced by this actually, but it at least has been alleged.
I could imagine a scenario. Okay, if you're gonna think
long and hard about the cenobytes of of Clive Barker
(40:36):
cell raiser, you could say, well, they're all about actual senses,
actual senses of of pleasure and pain, and therefore the
emotional context of pleasure and pain might be completely lost
on them, because yeah, they're all about like stick and
hooks and things and and so forth, and and the
tightening of leather, not so much about anticipating the pain
(40:58):
or reflecting on the pain. So I don't know, now
I'm back backtracking. Maybe it is totally on brand, but
maybe maybe would have been more impactful if if ten
had had been said something like just to express that
he doesn't even understand what's happening. What are you doing? Why?
Why is there liquid coming out of your face? Liquid
shouldn't be coming out of your body unless it is
a response to direct physical stimuli. Since I mentioned it,
(41:22):
I figured I might as well explain the idea of
the sort of step down theory of tears. Um So.
I was reading about this in an article in The
Washington Post from April sixteen by Mary Kim called the
Science of a Good Cry, and this involved an interview
with an emeritus professor of psychology at Temple University named J. E. Ron,
(41:43):
who had advocated what was called in this article a
two stage theory of emotional tears, which would be kind
of similar to the two stage theory of laughter, which
posits that maybe laughter functions when tension is first raised
by the setup of a joke and then suddenly lowered
by the punch lines that stepped down to the lower
level of tension. Under this theory, that causes the laughter
(42:06):
as the result of a joke. Uh The idea here
is that maybe crying works in a similar fashion. Uh So,
I want to read a quote from this article that's
explaining a friend's view here. Uh. Quote, people experience a
crying fit when something happens to first spark high anxiety
or distress, followed by a moment of recalibration or release.
(42:26):
For instance, a child that loses his mother at the
grocery store. Begins by frantically searching for her, getting more
and more worried as he scans the aisles. Suddenly he
hears her call his name from behind, sees her comforting face,
and promptly bursts into tears. And uh and uh. It
goes on to explain how this could maybe also work
for things that appear to be tears of joy. Um,
(42:50):
maybe like while you're planning a wedding for your child,
you know they're there's sort of a high anxiety, high
stress preparation stage, but then during the ceremony itself, it's
kind of everything is culminated and then there's a release
of tension and then you cry. So, according to this
this hypothesis here, emotional tears would occur not really at
the onset of distress, but at the onset of relief
(43:13):
from distress. I'm not sure how convinced I am by this.
I'm not sure how well it lines up with actual
instances of crying, but it does seem to be somewhat corroborated,
at least by um what parts of the nervous system
seem to be activated, like crying does seem to be
more associated with activation of the parasympathetic nervous system as
(43:36):
opposed to the sympathetic nervous system. So the sympathetic nervous
system is what's usually associated with high stress conditions, fight
or flight, goose bumps, all that kind of thing. And
then usually when you when you're done with a sympathetic
nervous system response, you know, the the high stress is subsided,
you shift back down into activation of the parasympathetic nervous system,
(43:57):
which is often known as the relax and restore war
system or the rest and digest system. It's the stuff
that's uh normal, involuntary activities of the body that are
happening when you're not in a state of heightened stress
or anxiety. And this is the system that crying seems
to be more associated with. Uh So, so that would
be an interesting indication in favor of this this two
(44:18):
stage emotional tier theory. But still I'm not sure how
correctly the theory rings. Just with experience of wind crying
happens and how it happens. Yeah, I mean, it just
it becomes so complex when you start trying to tease
a part you know, emotional and physical responses to you know,
often you know complex stimuli. That is, you know, this
(44:40):
is something kind of thing that you know, Pinhead's not
gonna understand. It's just a it's a it's a tangled
knot of human emotion. Oh we did, We did get
set off on that whole thing, but Pinhead didn't. We
we did, we did. Alright, Well, on that note, we're
gonna go ahead and close out this part two of
our look at Tears. We are going to come back
with part three, and I'm excited to get into some
(45:01):
of the mythological and religious stuff a bit more in
that one, but there will be a short gap. We
have a special interview episode that we're excited about that's
gonna air Tuesday, and then the following Thursday, we should
be back with Tears Part three. If all goes according
to plan. Yeah, if it doesn't, that means something changed.
There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Yes, we'll
(45:23):
have to get into that. What's with all the teeth gnashing?
I don't know. Maybe we'll get into that in part three.
What does nash ing mean? What is it? What is
it to nash to bite to like grind your teeth?
I was just imagine that. Yeah, just kind of like
weeping and just you know, um, so perhaps we should
explore that, maybe maybe there there's some legs to that question.
(45:45):
Experts on gnashing right in. Yeah, all right. If you
want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow
Your Mind, you'll find them all on the Stuff to
Blow your Mind podcast feed, which you can find wherever
you get your podcast. We have core episodes in two
season Thursdays, Artifact on Wednesday, listener Mail on Monday, Weird
House set Him on Friday. That's when we just kick
back and discuss a weird movie, and then on the
(46:06):
weekend we have a rerun of a core episode. Huge
thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, just to say hello, you
can email us at contact. That's Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production
(46:34):
of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for My Heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're
listening to your favorite shows.
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
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